The University of Colorado is in the lead on a project billed as "American Gut," an open-access endeavor aimed at identifying the trillions of microbes dwelling in our intestines and the rest of our bodies.

By doing so, researchers hope also to learn more about what those microbes are doing for us -- and to us.

The study is in partnership with the Human Food Project and piggybacks on the five-year, $173 million National Institutes of Health-backed Human Microbiome Project. It is aimed at identifying the microbes in our physiology and determining their functions, including digesting food and bolstering immune systems.

Associate professor Rob Knight, of CU's BioFrontiers Institute, said the human body typically harbors 10 trillion to 100 trillion individual microbes, outnumbering its own cells by about a 10-to-1 ratio.

"Almost all of them are benign -- when they are in the right place," Knight said. Microbes can stave off disease. But in some cases, they trigger illness, causing inflammation or ulcers.

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While previous studies examining people's microbial makeup have been very selective in participants and limited in scope, the goal of "American Gut" is to entice tens of thousands of people to dig down deep and share a piece of themselves with science.

"Galileo saw outer space through his telescope, and we want to see the inner space of your gut through modern genetics," said Rob Dunn, a scientist at North Carolina State University collaborating on the project, according to a news release.

A central purpose of the study is to better understand how differences in diet and lifestyle, whether they are a matter of choice (vegetarians and athletes, for instance) or necessity (those with allergies or auto-immune diseases), affect individuals' microbial makeup.

The project is being crowd-funded, and about 18,000 people have signed up so far to receive more information about it.

"You might want to know how your microbes look when you eat vast amounts of turkey at Thanksgiving, or when you start a diet, or how it changes when you go to Mexico and drink the water," Knight said.

"And you might want to know how similar your microbes are to other members of your family, your partner, your child or your dog. You might also want to know if your microbes resemble those of other people who are similar to you in other ways -- whether they are in the same location, or people who eat the same diet or engage in the same sports."

Knight added, "At this stage, we don't have that great a handle on those things. This will contribute to helping us find out the answers to those questions, and whole lot of others."

The website for the American Gut project offers tiered plans for participation, ranging from $25 for a tee-shirt promoting the project up to $25,000, which buys a detailed map of the contributor's gut microbiome, with "ultra-deep sequencing" of the individual's sample aimed at generating as many individual bacterial genomes as possible.

The project offers a donor option at the $500 contribution level called "A Week of Feces," directing donors to collect and submit a stool sample every day for week along with detailed dietary information. So far, according to the project website, there have been no takers for that one.

Other suggested contributions are tied to the submission of just one stool sample and skin or oral swabs. With an overall fundraising goal of $400,000, less than $10,000 has been raised to date, with 45 days left in the funding campaign.

"We're taking this directly to the public, and we're hoping there are citizen-scientists who are excited to participate," Knight said. "The fundraising phase goes for a couple of months, and the idea is to hit the holiday season where a lot of people are thinking about food and their gut."

With sufficient influx of donations -- and volunteered samples -- the DNA sequencing of submitted microbial genomes should enable researchers to return data to project participants in the first part of the new year.

"The goal is to deliver the information back to participants in a way they understand -- and they're not going to understand everything, because even the scientists in the project don't understand everything," Knight said.

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